cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1104312
The upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 operating system promises a new feature called “permissions prompting” for an extra layer of privacy and security.
The new permissions prompting feature in Ubuntu will let users control, manage, and understand the behavior of apps running on their machines. It leverages Ubuntu’s AppArmor implementation and enables fine-grained access control over unmodified binaries without having to change the app’s source code.
From Ubuntu Discourse: Ubuntu Desktop’s 24.10 Dev Cycle - Part 5: Introducing Permissions Prompting
This solution consists of two new seeded components in Ubuntu 24.10, prompting-client and desktop-security-center alongside deeper changes to snapd and AppArmor available in the upcoming snapd 2.65. The first is a new prompting client (built in Flutter) that surfaces the prompt requests from the application via snapd. The second is our new Security Center:
In this release the Security Center is the home for managing your prompt rules, over time we will expand its functionality to cover additional security-related settings for your desktop such as encryption management and firewall control.
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With prompting enabled, an application that has access to the home interface in its AppArmor profile will trigger a request to snapd to ask the user for more granular permissions at the moment of access:
As a result, users now have direct control over the specific directories and file paths an application has access to, as well its duration. The results of prompts are then stored in snapd so they can be queried and managed by the user via the Security Center.
I’m not exactly sure whether or not this is good, but my gut feeling is that this sounds like it will very quickly become very annoying permission hell.
Presumably its only opt-in to the application you want to use it with. If this new system was applied to all applications by default, yeah it could become a problem. The reason why the permission control in Android and Flatpak works is, because those applications and packages are designed and built with these limitations by default and the user should not need to modify the permissions. There are a few cases (in Flatpak) where you need to change the permission, which is annoying, especially if you don’t know. How worse will it be with applications that are not designed with these limitations in mind and force them with permissions taken away with this new tool?
Overall I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to have a technology on your hand to limit permissions and access, but it needs to be opt-in. In example this could be useful for AppImages, that are downloaded from the web and not managed by your operating system or a community like Flathub.
It seems like it would be useful for things like camera permissions and stuff, but it seems a little unnecessarily complicated for file access compared to just using a filechooser portal like flatpak does, then the user can just select specifically what they want when they want to without having to think about permissions.
macOS can be a bit of a permission hell at times, but I’ll take it over having less control over the privacy and security of my system